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SOLAR WIND FORECAST: A stream of solar wind could hit Earth's magnetic field on Sept. 14th. The gaseous material is flowing from a canyon-like hole in the sun's southern atmosphere, and could spark a brief episode of Arctic auroras when it arrives. Aurora alerts: SMS Text.
RETROGRADE MARS: For months, astronomers have been watching Mars creep eastward among the stars of Pisces. Today, Sept. 9th, Mars reversed course. Now the planet is moving westward. Astronomers call this "retrograde motion." It's a sign that Earth and Mars are about to have a close encounter.
The video, above, created by graphic artist Larry Koehn, shows why Mars "goes retrograde." Basically, Earth is lapping Mars in a two-way race around the sun. Our planet is faster, so Mars seems to go backwards during the weeks of closest approach.
On Oct. 6th, the date of closest approach, Earth and Mars will be only 62 million km apart--a small distance by interplanetary standards. In fact, its one of the finest encounters in years. Mars will be up all night long, outshining every star in the sky with a piercing burnt-orange hue.
Even now, Mars is a lovely sight. It is shining almost twice as bright as Sirius, the brightest star in the sky, and its disk has swollen so large that even backyard telescopes reveal astonishing details:
Amateur astronomer Maximilian Teodorescu of Romania took these pictures using a 14-inch telescope. "It is now possible to photograph craters on Mars as small as 150 km wide," says Teodorescu. Not bad for "amateur" astronomy.
No telescope? No problem. The red light of Mars is easy to see with the unaided eye. Simply step outside between midnight and dawn, and look south. You can't miss it! And remember... the best is yet to come.
Realtime Mars Photo Gallery
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GIGANTIC JETS OVER PUERTO RICO: Tropical waves may not be the biggest storms in the Caribbean, but they produce some of the biggest lightning. On Sept. 5th, Frankie Lucena pointed his video camera at a tropical wave passing just south of Puerto Rico, and this is what he saw:
"I recorded some very impressive Gigantic Jet lightning events and clusters of sprites," he says. "They were huge."
For years, Lucena has been watching sprites and Gigantic Jets leap up from passing storms. Interestingly, he says, weaker systems often produce the strongest upward-directed lightning. "Based on my observations so far, I would say that intensifying tropical waves have the most sprites. Often these systems go on to become hurricanes."
Once a storm becomes a hurricane, however, sprite activity seems to subside. Lucena has surveyed many passing hurricanes; the tops of the great storms are strangely quiet. According to NASA, hurricanes produce less regular lightning, too. Swirling hurricanes typically lack the vertical winds required to charge up a storm and unleash powerful bolts. Perhaps sprites subside for the same reason.
Another tropical wave is forming near Africa, and it could potentially reach the Caribbean next week. Stay tuned for more Gigantic Jets.
Realtime Sprite Photo Gallery
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A BLACK PEARL IN THE STRATOSPHERE: It came from Tahiti--and now it's been to the edge of space. On Feb. 27, 2020, this genuine Black Tahitian South Sea Cultured Pearl flew to the stratosphere onboard an Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloon, soaring more than 100,000 feet above the Sierra Nevada mountains of central California:
You can have it for $209.95. The students are selling these exotic space pearls to fund their cosmic ray monitoring program. Measuring 10 mm in diameter, the pearl has an 18K white gold clasp and is suspended from a matching 925 Sterling Silver chain. Each pearl comes with a greeting card showing the pendant in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education
Realtime Aurora Photo Gallery
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Realtime Space Weather Photo Gallery
Free: Spaceweather.com Newsletter
Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Sept. 8, 2020, the network reported 27 fireballs.
(20 sporadics, 6 September epsilon Perseids, 1 Northern iota Aquarid)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On September 9, 2020 there were 2037 potentially hazardous asteroids.
|
Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
2020 RF1 | 2020-Sep-05 | 14 LD | 7.3 | 20 |
465824 | 2020-Sep-06 | 19.4 LD | 14 | 162 |
2020 RC | 2020-Sep-06 | 12.9 LD | 16.6 | 147 |
2020 RV | 2020-Sep-08 | 18.8 LD | 15 | 25 |
2020 PT4 | 2020-Sep-08 | 4.9 LD | 12.6 | 38 |
2020 RJ | 2020-Sep-08 | 3.3 LD | 9.3 | 24 |
2020 RW | 2020-Sep-10 | 15.8 LD | 8.4 | 33 |
2020 RM | 2020-Sep-11 | 2.7 LD | 6.6 | 14 |
2020 RA1 | 2020-Sep-11 | 8.7 LD | 10.1 | 29 |
2012 RM15 | 2020-Sep-12 | 14.9 LD | 9.8 | 45 |
2020 RB1 | 2020-Sep-13 | 11.7 LD | 7.7 | 16 |
2017 US | 2020-Sep-13 | 17.3 LD | 5.9 | 21 |
2020 QL2 | 2020-Sep-14 | 17.9 LD | 10.6 | 71 |
2014 QJ33 | 2020-Sep-17 | 6.7 LD | 8.7 | 65 |
2017 SL16 | 2020-Sep-20 | 8.9 LD | 6.4 | 25 |
2020 RO | 2020-Sep-25 | 15.3 LD | 11.9 | 76 |
2001 GP2 | 2020-Oct-01 | 6.1 LD | 2.2 | 15 |
2010 UC | 2020-Oct-04 | 14.6 LD | 3.2 | 12 |
2019 SB6 | 2020-Oct-07 | 11.9 LD | 7.6 | 16 |
2018 GD2 | 2020-Oct-13 | 16.4 LD | 6.7 | 5 |
2017 UH5 | 2020-Oct-20 | 8.9 LD | 5.9 | 18 |
2018 VG | 2020-Oct-21 | 15.1 LD | 6.7 | 12 |
2017 TK6 | 2020-Oct-24 | 17.3 LD | 12.4 | 41 |
2008 GM2 | 2020-Oct-25 | 17.7 LD | 3.6 | 8 |
2020 QD5 | 2020-Oct-26 | 10.1 LD | 8.6 | 80 |
2020 OK5 | 2020-Oct-29 | 6.4 LD | 1.3 | 27 |
2018 VP1 | 2020-Nov-02 | 1.1 LD | 9.7 | 2 |
2020 HF4 | 2020-Nov-03 | 16.2 LD | 2.9 | 11 |
2010 JL88 | 2020-Nov-05 | 10.5 LD | 15.7 | 16 |
2019 XS | 2020-Nov-07 | 15.4 LD | 9.4 | 51 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. MAG is the visual magnitude of the asteroid on the date of closest approach. | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
SOMETHING NEW! We have developed a new predictive model of aviation radiation. It's called E-RAD--short for Empirical RADiation model. We are constantly flying radiation sensors onboard airplanes over the US and and around the world, so far collecting more than 22,000 gps-tagged radiation measurements. Using this unique dataset, we can predict the dosage on any flight over the USA with an error no worse than 15%.
E-RAD lets us do something new: Every day we monitor approximately 1400 flights criss-crossing the 10 busiest routes in the continental USA. Typically, this includes more than 80,000 passengers per day. E-RAD calculates the radiation exposure for every single flight.
The Hot Flights Table is a daily summary of these calculations. It shows the 5 charter flights with the highest dose rates; the 5 commercial flights with the highest dose rates; 5 commercial flights with near-average dose rates; and the 5 commercial flights with the lowest dose rates. Passengers typically experience dose rates that are 20 to 70 times higher than natural radiation at sea level.
To measure radiation on airplanes, we use the same sensors we fly to the stratosphere onboard Earth to Sky Calculus cosmic ray balloons: neutron bubble chambers and X-ray/gamma-ray Geiger tubes sensitive to energies between 10 keV and 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Column definitions: (1) The flight number; (2) The maximum dose rate during the flight, expressed in units of natural radiation at sea level; (3) The maximum altitude of the plane in feet above sea level; (4) Departure city; (5) Arrival city; (6) Duration of the flight.
SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Approximately once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with radiation sensors that detect cosmic rays, a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. Cosmic rays can seed clouds, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. Furthermore, there are studies ( #1, #2, #3, #4) linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death in the general population. Our latest measurements show that cosmic rays are intensifying, with an increase of more than 18% since 2015:
The data points in the graph above correspond to the peak of the Regener-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Reneger and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
En route to the stratosphere, our sensors also pass through aviation altitudes:
In this plot, dose rates are expessed as multiples of sea level. For instance, we see that boarding a plane that flies at 25,000 feet exposes passengers to dose rates ~10x higher than sea level. At 40,000 feet, the multiplier is closer to 50x.
The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Why are cosmic rays intensifying? The main reason is the sun. Solar storm clouds such as coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays when they pass by Earth. During Solar Maximum, CMEs are abundant and cosmic rays are held at bay. Now, however, the solar cycle is swinging toward Solar Minimum, allowing cosmic rays to return. Another reason could be the weakening of Earth's magnetic field, which helps protect us from deep-space radiation.
| The official U.S. government space weather bureau |
| The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. |
| Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. |
| 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory |
| Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. |
| from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. |
| from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| the underlying science of space weather |
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